Penryn (2007), Nehalarm (2008), Westmere (2009) and Sandy Bridge (2010)…sounds like the names of exotic race horses set for debut. Wrong! These are the code names of multi-core chips coming out of Intel’s stable and set for launch at these respective years. These silicon race horses need able jockeys to make optimum use of the increase in cores on a single chip. Software programmers who are able to code effective threads to match the processor power would be in demand.

Intel India launched its Software Seminar Series at Hyderabad in June 2007. The intent of the program was to educate programmers about multi threading programming which comes in the wake of the campaign for its multi core processors. Also it introduced three software product enablers—compiler, debugger and threading tools—for multi thread programming.

Intel has taken its program on software creation tactics for multi-core chips to software developers to many universities in India, like the Visvesvaraya Technological University, Bangalore; IIT Kanpur, IIIT Pune and NIIT, apart from corporates.

At present the company has just launched the Intel Core 2 Extreme Quad Core Processor. Around a million quad core units were sold worldwide by early 2007. About 1000 Intel engineers worldwide are working on multi-core processors. The evolution of these silicon wafers has been faster than the programmers who code can stomach.

Parallelism – In Fashion now
Evolution of parallelism has come a long way and now the future looks bleak for single core processors. The year 1994 saw the launch of single core and just one year later the world had its first dual core. Speed to 1996 and the first quad core emerged on the processor horizon. And now the buzz is multi-core and that parallelism is here to stay. Multi-core is about running two or more CPUs on one chip. It boosts well written multi threaded applications and not single threaded ones. Thus work is divided across threads in a program written in the same format as the parallel multiple lanes in a highway. This is nothing but hyper threading wherein two or more threads are running parallel inside a single CPU. Hence software does not run serially because of the absence of a serial code.